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Source:Mashable!

When the CEO one of the most followed companies on the Web goes on stage for two hours, you can bet that the press will be listening to every word, looking to break a major piece of news for their respective organization. But yesterday, with Mark Zuckerberg on stage at F8, why did we all (including us) feel so compelled to “live blog” the event, given it was being broadcast live on video – quite publicly - via Facebook’s own web site? In retrospect, it seems rather ridiculous.

While plenty of big news came out of the event – the launch of Facebook Connect, Facebook Translations for Developers, and the Great Apps program, just to name a few things – it seems like those who cared enough to get these announcements “live” were most likely either in attendance or watching the video stream. Beyond that, if people wanted to discuss the announcements, Twitter or Friendfeed offered a perfect medium. This is all besides the fact that the press release itemizing Facebook’s major product launches was distributed to the media moments after Zuckerberg took the stage, leading us (and a number of other tech blogs) to publish stories detailing the news before Facebook even got to that part of their presentation.

Liveblogging certainly has its place, especially for events where not everyone has access. But what are we gaining by liveblogging something that everyone else can see? And it’s not just keynote speeches at conferences either – blogs now routinely liveblog conference calls, press conferences, and other events that anyone can tune into, usually by going to a company’s investor relations or press page. While news does often break during these events, the people who really care are already tuned in, while the few people reading the liveblog have to sort through paragraph upon paragraph of unimportant notes to find the one piece of potentially breaking news.

Beyond the overkill of liveblogging public events, I also don’t see what good it does from a business perspective as a publisher either. Versus listening to an event or a conference call and making a post detailing the news when it’s over, a liveblog usually offers a boring headline (“Live: F8 Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg”), is very difficult to read, and has minimal long-term value. Compared to a post where you cover and analyze the news, write a headline that articulates what the story is about, and create long-term value in terms of content that is indexable and can be backlinked, liveblogging just doesn’t make sense.

Proponents of liveblogging such events would likely argue that it offers not only breaking news, but instant insight into the event from the perspective of someone in attendance. While that is true to some extent, there is a ton more insight taking place elsewhere, via discussions on services like Twitter and Friendfeed.

I’m sure we’ll continue to liveblog events here on Mashable, and I’m sure others will continue to do so as well. I’m just not sure why.

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Source:Mashable!

In the past few weeks Plurk has released a number of updates in preparation for its upcoming API launch. Improvements include, a new customizable sidebar widget, new starter verbs such as “wonders” and “needs,” a cleaner “All Plurks,” and “My Plurks” navigation, along with a custom search feature. Plurk has even enhanced their competitive ranking system, also known as “Karma” to make the algorithm more fair and balanced.

Another feature that Plurk recently implemented that reminds me of the unofficial Twitter extended backgrounds is the ability to customize everything on your profile via CSS if your Karma is over 25. Customizing your profile background is something that some Twitter users, myself included, have wanted to see, but after seeing a few backgrounds and profiles in Plurk, I’m not so sure. Take a look below:

Plurk fail whale:

Animated gator background:

I’m not saying they’re bad - I’ll let you be the judge of that. But customizing backgrounds should be an enhancement and not a distraction to users, especially since many Plurk users are waiting for desktop integration such as Plurker, a Windows WPF desktop application or twhirl.

For those of us who Plurk on a regular basis I would say that we’re satisfied with the service’s development and features — and just this week Plurk was added to the list of supported sites on FriendFeed. However, Plurk’s community and conversations still remain a question. Currently from the twitter/tech/blog community, Darren Rowse of Problogger and Majo of Live Crunch are making headway up the interesting plurkers karma list. But still, without an API, no desktop application, and some of the most popular topics on Plurk being “good morning,” “good night,” “hi,” “sex” and “coffee,” it will be interesting to see what audience Plurk continues to build.

Is Plurk the MySpace or Facebook of micro-blogging? Only time will tell.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:I Like Plurk Better Than Twitter, But Should I Even Bother?Three Very Important Plurk StatisticsPlurk Set To Release API But Remains the Underdog in the Race Against TwitterPlurkmania Brings You All the Plurk Stats You Can EatZannel Raises $10M to Take On Twitter with Mobile Multimedia ServiceSeesmic Acquires Twhirl, for Desktop Video MicrobloggingIdenti.ca: The Force is Strong with This One (But is no Jedi, Yet)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 5:57 pm and is filed under web 2.0, web, social software, social media, twitter, Web2.0 Startups, FriendFeed, API, Opinion, microblogging, Plurk, status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.